A fifteen-year-old boy -- let's call him David -- has been yearning for his
driver's license for a long time.

But today all thoughts of waiting for his license are out the window, because
his little sister cut herself and he can't stop the bleeding. His family's phone
service was cut off long ago. His parents aren't home. They live far from any
neighbors. But they do have one uninsured car that David's been tinkering
with. It runs.

So David puts his sister in the car and, holding a towel on the wound to apply
pressure, he drives the car one-handed out onto the road and goes as fast as
the car can go, heading for the nearest medical emergency center.

The trouble is, a state trooper sees him driving too fast and pulls him over.
David tries to explain that he's only driving illegally in order to save his sister's
life, but the trooper doesn't listen.

He drags David out of the car and handcuffs him and yells at him that he has
no business driving a car without a license, besides which he was speeding and
the car is not insured. "You will never get a license, we will confiscate this
illegal car. Driving is a privilege, not a right, and you have forfeited that
privilege by taking it prematurely."

David can't think about any of this. So he screams, "My sister is bleeding to
death! Let me get her to the hospital!"

But it's as if the trooper is deaf to anything David has to say. "Don't scream it
me, you miserable pipsqueak! Until you have a license you don't even have a
right to be heard on these highways!"

*

I'm sick at heart about the number of Americans, including friends of mine
who should know better, who are proud of being exactly like that state trooper,
when it comes to the question of illegal immigrants.

"They have no right to be here in the first place. If we give these people
amnesty and let them stay and apply for citizenship, we only encourage more
illegal immigration in the future. Besides, they use up our welfare and add to
our school costs without paying taxes!"

In vain do the immigrants try to explain that their families were desperately
poor, doomed to continue to live on the edge of starvation, and the only hope
was America ... which wouldn't let them in.

Why can't we look at what these people are actually doing? Why can't we see
the bleeding child in the passenger seat, and realize that most of these illegal
immigrants are doing precisely what you or I would do in the same
circumstances?

No. All we can think to say is, "You broke the law to get here. Therefore I don't
have to regard you as a human being or consider what your need was or look
at what you have done since you got here. Since you are here illegally, nothing
you do or say makes any difference. I want you out of here."

*

So what is this vile crime of "illegal immigration" that requires us to throw out
hard-working people who do jobs that no American was willing to do (not at
those wages, anyway, not while living in that housing)?

It consists of crossing over an arbitrary line that somebody drew in the dirt a
century and a half ago. On one side of the line, poverty, hopelessness, a social
system that keeps you living as a peasant, keeps your children uneducated and
doomed to the same miserable life you have -- or worse.

On the other side of the line, plenty of jobs that are going begging because
nobody who lives on that side is desperate enough to work all day for a wage so
low. But the wage is enormous to you. It would save your family's lives, give
you hope for your children. Even if you go there alone and send money home,
it would be a blessing. And if you could get your wife and kids across that line,
their lives would be miraculously transformed.

Wouldn't you take any risk to get across that line?

*

Let's use another analogy. There's just been a disaster. No aid is getting into
your area. You can't get out. Your family is desperate for drinking water and
something to eat.

The local convenience store has food on its shelves and water in its refrigerator
cases. But the owner stands in the doorway and says, "We're closed. We're
closed to anyone but regular customers."

You try to explain: You'll pay. You'll become a regular customer. But your
family needs water to drink.

"Nope," he says. "I know who my regular customers are and you aren't one of
them. Go away."

But as you leave, you see that his back door is standing open! Now, you have
been taught never to steal. And you never would steal except ... he's being
completely unreasonable; he's letting other people in; you'd be glad to buy if
he'd only let you.

In those circumstances, what would be morally worse: To sneak in and take
the water and a bit of food -- which is stealing -- or to let the family you're
responsible for go without food and water, and quite possibly die? Which
action is more to be condemned?

But he's a looter! you might explain.

Well, there are looters in such times, and looting is a crime. But we're talking
about stealing food and water for family members who have no other recourse,
not breaking in and taking fancy tv sets. Isn't there a difference of degree?
Can't we consider mitigating circumstances?

*

We Americans, what exactly did we do to earn our prosperity, our freedom?
Well, for most of us, what we did was: be born.

Yeah, we work for our living and pay our taxes and all that, but you know
what? I haven't seen many native-born American citizens who work as hard as
the Mexican-born people I see working in minimum-wage jobs in laundries and
yard services and intermittent subcontracting projects and other semi-skilled
and unskilled positions.

I have no idea which (if any) of the people I see doing this work are legals and
which are illegals -- but that's my point. Latin American immigrants, as a
group, are hard-working, family-centered, God-fearing people who contribute
mightily to our economy.

*

"Yes, but the illegal ones pay no taxes! They're freeloading on our system,
putting a burden on our schools," yadda yadda. And why do I say yadda
yadda?

Because at the wages they're earning, even if they were citizens they wouldn't
pay income taxes. We don't ask people making that little money to pay income
tax in this country.

As for the other taxes, they pay them exactly as any other poor people in
America pay taxes. At the store, they pay the same sales tax as the rest of us.
When they buy gas, they pay gas taxes. When they pay rent to their landlords,
some of that goes to paying the property taxes the landlord is required to pay
-- just like every other renter.

Most of them are, in fact, paying exactly as much in taxes as they would pay if
they were legal immigrants.

*

"But they come here and commit crimes and live off of our welfare system!"

Wait a minute. Who is "they"? All of the illegal immigrants?

Only a certain percentage of them. But when we round up illegal immigrants,
do we make the slightest effort to distinguish between those who commit
crimes here, those who scam the system to get welfare, and those who are
working hard and living by all the rules?

No. We send them all home. There is, under present law, no special treatment
for illegal immigrants who, during their time in the U.S., work hard and don't
take anything from anybody without paying for it. No special consideration for
those who live in shockingly desperate poverty here in the United States so
they can send most of their pitifully low earnings home to their families in
Mexico.

And yet most of the illegal immigrants commit no crimes, but instead live
frugally and work hard. In fact, I dare say that many illegal immigrants work
harder and obey our social rules more faithfully than a good many citizens
whose right to live within our borders is unquestioned.

And if all you can say to that is, "It doesn't matter, send them all home, give
them no hope of citizenship because we don't want to reward people for
breaking the law to enter our country," then here's my answer to you:

Let's apply that standard across the board. No mercy. No extenuating
circumstances. No sense of punishment that is proportionate to the crime.
Let's handle traffic court that way.

The penalty for breaking any traffic law, from now on, is: revocation of your
license and confiscation of your car. Period. DWI? Well, we already do that
(though usually for something like the nineteenth offense). But now let's
punish speeders the same way. Driving 50 in a school zone -- lose your license
and your car! Driving 70 in a 65 zone on the freeway? No license, no car. Not
coming to a full stop at an intersection? No license, no car.

No mercy, no exceptions, no consideration for the differences between traffic
offenders.

Oh, you don't want to live under those rules? Well, you can't deny that people
would take the driving laws much more seriously, right?

"But it wouldn't be fair!" you reply.

That's right. It wouldn't be fair. Yet that's exactly the same level of fairness
that I hear an awful lot of Americans demanding in order to curtail the problem
of illegal immigration.

*

And here's the question that really needs to be asked:

What problem?

This isn't like drug laws, where despite the claims of some, we know that these
illegal drugs are life-wrecking, family-destroying substances that would
continue to create an enormous drain on our economy and immeasurable
damage to American lives even if we made them all legal.

The only thing that makes illegal immigration a problem is that it's illegal. If
we simply opened our southern border the way all our borders were open in the
1800s, then would there be any continuing burden?

Most of these immigrants would still work hard, only now they would have
their families with them and the money would not drain away to Mexico. Those
who prospered would pay income taxes. So economically, there would be an
improvement.

Some would freeload off the system; some would become criminals. But do we
have any evidence that Mexican or Latin American immigrants turn to crime or
freeloading in greater numbers than any previous group of immigrants? Hasn't
every immigrant community in our history had its criminal element?

(Hint: There is no major immigrant group that has not spawned its criminals.
Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Russian Jews -- no group, with the
exception of some groups of religious immigrants, was so righteous that
criminals weren't able to operate within their social boundaries in the U.S.)

And yet we would have regarded it as a great injustice to throw out all the
immigrants from each of these groups, just because some of them committed
crimes. In this country, we have a long tradition of punishing only the
individual who does wrong, not his entire ethnic group. (Though, come to
think of it, there are a lot of people who would like to change that -- but that's
another argument.)

So what, exactly, would be the cost to us of an open-door immigration policy?
What evidence do we have that the immigrants who would flood across our
boundaries would be any worse than the waves of Irish, German, Chinese,
Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Japanese, or British immigrants?

*

The voice of bigotry speaks: "But they're dirty, they don't speak the language,
they live in such awful conditions."

Hey, buddy! They're dirty because they're poor and exhausted and they work
with their hands and they sweat from their labor! They don't speak the
language because they weren't born here and in case you've never tried it
yourself, learning another language is hard. And they live in awful conditions
because they're doing lousy, low-paying jobs and sending the money home.

How clean, fluent, and well-housed would you be if you moved to Turkey, took
the lowest paying jobs in Turkish society, were struggling to learn Turkish
during the few moments you were awake and not laboring, and had to support
your family back in the home country on whatever you didn't spend to stay
alive in Istanbul?

Of course, these complaints are often disguised ways of saying, "We don't want
them here because they're brown and most of them look like Indians." Only we
know better than to admit that's our motive, even to ourselves. So we find
other words to cover the same territory.

Just remember this. Each new wave of immigrants from a particular country
looked different from those who had come before. But after two or three
generations, with or without intermarriage, we got used to seeing them among
us. Their skin and bone structure and hair type and color became just another
way of looking American.

Of course, Mexicans and Indians have been here all along. If they look strange
to you, it's just because you haven't lived in a part of the country where it is
common to see people whose ancestors lived here long before those of
European ancestry showed up.

And a lot of those who get mad at seeing "all these illegal immigrants" may not
even have seen any. Because a lot of people in our country who look Mexican
or Indian are actually sixth- and seventh-generation Americans whose
ancestors were citizens long before yours were.

*

"But they displayed the Mexican flag!"

Yeah, well, that's because they're still Mexicans. If we opened the door to their
legal immigration, maybe they'd become citizens and then they would feel
differently about the stars and stripes.

Then again, maybe they'd continue to be proud of their ethnic heritage and
continue to display the Mexican flag from time to time. Kind of like the wearin'
o' the green, don't you think?

*

Here's a little history. When the nation of Mexico declared its independence
from Spain, it contained within its boundaries the states of California, Nevada,
Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, much of Colorado, and bits of a few other
states.

But immigrants from the United States came into Texas and California, not
asking permission, not making any effort to become good Mexicans, but
instead began to plot to throw the Mexican government out of its own territory
and replace it with the government of the United States.

And they succeeded. Those Americans in Texas revolted against the Mexican
government and succeeded in establishing an independent republic that was
absolutely ruled by the white immigrant minority, which immediately began to
oppress the legal Mexican citizens.

Then the Texans claimed the Rio Grande as their boundary, contrary to the
original treaty, and this time when the Mexican government tried to protect its
boundaries, the United States weighed in on the side of Texas and when it won
the resulting war, it not only established the Rio Grande as the boundary of
Texas, the U.S. seized all those other states as well!

Oh, yeah, we "paid for them." And we did buy that Gadsden Purchase portion
of Arizona. Like they had a choice about selling them to us.

That's the nightmare story of illegal immigration. If Americans start moving
into your territory, be afraid! Be very afraid!

By one perfectly rational reading of history, the whole southwestern quarter of
the United States actually consists of unjustly conquered territory in which the
native inhabitants -- the legal citizens -- were torn apart from their fellow
citizens to the south, and our immigration policy consists of denying Mexicans
the right to access lands that were historically theirs, and where former
Mexican citizens who were involuntarily annexed to the U.S. were long
oppressed and discriminated against.

And let's not even get into the whole issue of Native Americans. But even with
that, take a look at how many of these illegal immigrants are obviously
primarily Indian in their ancestry, with almost no hint of any Spanish or
European blood of any kind. And these are the people we say have no right to
cross that arbitrary line in the dirt that our forebears put there by brute force?

There is no historical basis for any American to claim the moral high ground
when talking about Mexican immigration to the United States. Sure, those
wars happened long ago. But how different do you think the history of Mexico
might have been if all that Texas oil and all that California gold had stayed
within the boundaries of Mexico, as by right they should have?

So it's best if we don't bring morality into the discussion. We aren't exactly on
the squeaky clean side.

*

As for those who get all frantic about how America will become a Spanish-speaking nation, all you're doing is revealing your complete ignorance of the
history of immigration in the United States. To put it bluntly: You don't know
what you're talking about.

All large groups of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries have gone
through a period of time -- sometimes many generations -- where large
numbers of them lived together and spoke the language of the mother country.
We had many neighborhoods and even towns and cities where the only
language spoken was German or Yiddish or Swedish or Chinese.

But these people weren't stupid. They caught on to the fact that people whose
children spoke English without an accent got better jobs, advanced more
quickly and rose higher through the educational system, and had a better
chance of getting political and economic power.

Mexican immigrants know this. The overwhelming majority want their kids to
be fluent in English. This is not even a problem.

But in the meantime, which is better, to have public documents printed in the
languages people who live here actually speak, or shut out large sections of the
populace because we want to punish them for not having been born in
America?

Efforts to "protect English" are the exact equivalent of those signs saying "No
Irish Need Apply" or the rules limiting the number of Jews who could be
admitted to prestigious universities or the laws telling black people where they
could and could not sit in buses and trains. English doesn't need protection.
People need protection from those who would hurt them because they weren't
born to English-speaking parents.

*

Today, what is President Bush actually proposing? Not amnesty -- that would
mean declaring all the current illegal immigrants to be legal, no questions
asked.

Instead, he's giving them a way to earn the right to become citizens and
become compliant with the law, without having to go back to Mexico first. So
they could keep their jobs, keep supporting their families, continue to
contribute to our economy and our tax base as they already do.

Since the only crime most of these people are committing is simply being here
without permission, we would give them a reasonable way to get that
permission without losing everything else in order to get it.

And then we'd provide a way for Mexicans to enter our country as guest
workers, which would help both Mexico and the United States.

Along with this, as a political sop to those who think that illegal immigration is
somehow picking their pockets (when in fact it's more likely to be mowing their
lawns or harvesting their food), he is offering better border enforcement.

Meanwhile, the terrorists who actually threaten this country keep getting in by
air or sea or over the Canadian border, and doing it, as often as not, with legal
documents.

Ah well. Just as the "problem" of these "awful immigrants" has always been
with us, so also have we always had the grandchildren of immigrants trying to
slam the door in the faces of others who want to do nothing worse than become
part of our vast American experiment just as our ancestors did.

Hey Scott. I don't always completely agree with you, especially politically. (Of
course.) But I have said everything you said here, except less lyrically.

Did you see the article comparing illegals to home invaders? They move into your
home without your knowledge or permission, but you have to allow them to stay
because they keep the yard nice?

I was so incensed, I think I made some enemies. My point was yours. Who says
it's "your" home? So your great great great grandfather fought the Indians for it?
Okay. Would it be okay, then, for the Mexican family to just shoot you and your
children, and THEN move in? Isn't that how the current owner got there?

I realize you're not the president and probably can't make anything happen -- but
it was still a wonderful thing to read that I am not the only person alive who looks
on the border hysteria as medieval racism and the terrorist scare tactics as
ridiculously transparent.

I have lived in Southern California and Central Arizona for most of my adult life.
These families are not "low lifes." Their kids work as hard as their parents, think
nothing of working two or three jobs and saving the entire paycheck from at least
one, for long term family goals, regardless of the rigorous self-denial it entails.
The second generation emigres in my kids' schools were often the class presidents
and scholarship recipients -- not because they were genetically superior, but
because they were not afraid of hard work, and they had, in many cases, the joyful,
affectionate personality that we sometimes associate with Latin people.

I made your argument, that the "crime" is stepping over an imaginary line in the
sand. Everything else is just us, inventing ways to express our prejudice and
superiority complex. As you have pointed out, it is now an embarrasing case of
"might makes right."

What about the golden rule? How "right" would it be if Canada became powerful
enough to invade us and take all the resources we need to thrive, then tell us we
are not allowed to come back without paying their price? I'm no historian, but it
probably goes without saying that a lot of Mexicans died trying to defend their
property when we invaded their land.

Are we such bullies that we can't imagine how that would feel?

I completely agree with you that, until our borders are open, we can never consider
ourselves enlightened humans. Where do we get off "owning" a section of the
earth? Are we really afraid that our economy will fail if we don't "keep out the
riff-raff"? And I hope that sounds as offensive to you as it does to me. I have
lived and worked with these folks. I would be a much finer person if I could adopt
their work ethic and their love and loyalty for their families and friends. Why are
we so afraid? Projection?

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.